Nightmares
by oODazzyOo
Summary: They've completed the game. At eighteen, the kids are once again scattered across the globe of a new world, not unlike Earth. The downside? They've lost their memories of ever playing the game-or at least, lucid memories. Grimdark memories plague Rose's mind every passing moment. With nobody to turn to, though, she can do nothing but endure it. (Grimdorks AU.)
1. Candle in a Hurricane

Nightmares.

They worsened with every passing day; the darkness, the indiscernable language that sounded so familiar, yet so foreign. The glistening multitude of eyes peering at her from a deep void, haunting her with every passing moment she spent engulfed in dreams.

She found herself forced awake, palms cold and clammy, fists clenched until her knuckles whitened and blood was drawn from nails digging into her palms. She would wake, shivering and sweating at the same time, her breathing labored like something had wrapped constricting tentacles around her lungs.

She would sit awake through the long night, her fingers entangled in her unkempt blonde hair, nails cutting into the flesh on her scalp. There seemed to be nobody to turn to. Somewhere deep inside her vast expanse of mind, she could have sworn that once upon a time, there was. There should be someone she could lean on in the hellish time she was living in.

There was nobody. She lived alone in her empty house, aside from her mother. But Ms. Lalonde had her own problems. Wracked with devilish nightmares of her own, at least she was able to rinse it all away by the time she downed the second glass of wine. She wasn't about to allow her daughter a haven induced by alcohol to push away the terrors of living lucidly.

Rose found no other way to seek comfort. At the age she should have been finessing her education at college, transforming it into a tool intended for utilization in life later, she was instead shut up in the confines of her room, shuddering as those eyes peered at her from the crevices in her mind. Vague floating shards of thoughts, like broken glass, floated in and out of the focus of her thoughts. Every intake of stale, filtered air was shaky, shuddery, as tentacles came for her in her mind, reaching, grabbing, pulling her down, into darkness. Her complexion had taken on a ghostly white hue, her jaw tight and grinding her teeth together.

She needed someone. Someone to turn to. If only she realized that.


	2. Taste What You're Made Of

_A/N - In case you might not notice, this is the first Homestuck fanfiction I've written. cx Kind of surprised that this has even been read, so, thanks. Just going to be keeping these chapters short and simple, though, so don't get your hopes up._ ovo;

* * *

Oh, Rose did detest her mother sometimes.

Time dragged on like a sloth, and as the weeks drew out into months, the vivid nightmares seeped into her waking world. From every corner of existence that surrounded her, those eyes, the ones that had apparently not been terrifying enough for sleep alone, were peering at her. Rose's mental state was a delicate one. Her mind was fragile, panic around every corner. She should not be exposed to anything that could cause her a mental overload. Obnoxious light or sound? Most certainly not.

And then there was her mother. As much as Ms. Lalonde cared for her only daughter, socializing seemed to hold a higher level of importance to her than her daughter's mental health. So to a party.

Once upon a time, Rose could have sat down in a room full of flashy lights and colors, and simply analyzed the adults within her mother's social circle. She could have immediately diagnosed their mental state, their personality, everything, with snippets of small talk and distanced analysis. That would have been the case, with her level at a usual mental state. It was not the case anymore. Tonight, the hallucinations were vivid, and she'd blocked herself within the cozy confines of her room, clutching a velvet pillow to her chest and tucked away in a corner. She didn't want anything to do with the blaring noises rising from the lower level. She was too deeply immersed within the illusions that wracked her mind. Tentacles, feeling all too real, reached out from a dark abyss of nothingness to grab her. Those eyes once more flashed in the dark of her room, before fading away from her sight.

There was a soft tap against the oak wood of her locked door.

"Rose, could you come downstairs? There's plenty of nice people down here, if you would just perhaps clean yourself up and leave your room for a bit."

Should she have been in her rightful state of mind, Rose would have condescendingly noted that her mother was upstairs, on the same level as herself. Unfortunately, that was not to be.

"No," she whimpered, her voice soft and muffled through the heavy velvet of her pillow. The noise barely even reached her own ears, nevermind her mother behind the door on the far side of the room.

"Just for a minute or two. You need to leave your room for at least a little bit. Mentally fragile as you are, you need to socialize a bit. Maybe a little more human contact will help your recovery. You can come back to your room as soon as I'm happy with it."

Rose contemplated. Her mom sounded in full control of her mental faculties. She had permitted her own terrifying thoughts to haunt her, just to talk to her daughter while she was still sober. At least, it seemed that way. Typically, if Ms. Lalonde was holding a party, by now she would be on the third bottle.

Rose stood up shakily. The hallucinated tentacles grabbed at her heels, and she drew in a sharp breath, shaking her feet until the malicious tendrils relinquished their hold. She tiptoed nervously and lightly over to her closet. Thanks to a blatant lack of luck, the closet door she pulled open first had a mirror plastered to it on the inside, and Rose finally had a clear grasp of what she looked like.

Her hair was unkempt, knotted, and lacked any sheen it might have once held. The ends were splitting, and she had allowed it to grow into complete chaos over time. Her face wasn't much better either: skin white as a ghost, her lavender eyes round with panic, like a deer in the headlights. Her lips were pale, lacking any makeup she may have applied in recent times.

Rose bit her lip, running a hand through her hair. Surely, her mother wouldn't allow her to go down there looking nearly as terrible as her mind? Of course not.

"I'll be down in a moment, mom," she murmured, barely loud enough to satisfy the ears of the woman on the opposite side of the door. Ms. Lalonde walked away from her daughter's room, pleased with the results of a few simple sentences.

Rose stared herself down in the mirror. Even in the shadow of her room, it was obvious that this would be a very long, drawn-out moment if she was even thinking about appearing presentable to everybody downstairs.


	3. Stand

_- Hey. For those of you that actually followed this, thanks for being patient with me. I'm unable to access on my other computer, and I've also been having really bad writer's block. I rewrote this about twelve times and I'm still not entirely happy with it, but hey, I figured you might want another chapter so have the longest chapter yet, not exactly top-notch quality, but whatever._

* * *

"This may possibly be the worst mistake I have ever made and will ever make in my entire life," Rose muttered to herself.

She stood, frozen, in the spacious doorway that opened into the living room. The lights were dim, but the occupants of the room were chattering, laughing, socializing, and—worst of all—staring directly at her.

Rose's lavender irises held their deer-in-the-headlights appearance as the adults analyzed her. Their expressions, the soft way they murmured to each other, and their judgemental glances immediately told her that her mother had already confirmed her arrival. If you prefer it spelled out in a cliché, they'd been expecting her.

Her blonde hair had gone untrimmed as the months piled on top of each other, now tickling the nape of her neck, rather than being cut cleanly at the base of her head as it had been the last time she'd left her shadowed lair of a room. The bright orange-and-gold dress she wore appeared neon against her bleached complexion, and the layering of matte black lipstick constrasted the appearance she was trying for in every possible way. Her mother's stern glance from the corner of the room displayed a mixture of pleasure and disconcertion—borrowing Ms. Lalonde's black lipstick probably wasn't the wisest thing to do when she was trying to mask Rose's obsession in eldritch horrors, as well as the splintering state of her mind.

Typically, Rose showed up dressed plainly, pretending to lounge about in the armchair in the corner of the living room, which was currently occupied by a strange figure that didn't quite seem to be recognizable at the moment. From there, she scanned over faces in the room, familiar or otherwise, and analyzed them from afar. She took note of those closer to her mother, whom she would be expecting more often. She would note on their personalities, their social interactions, every minor detail they would let slip within the Lalonde household. One may ridicule this sort of behavior, degrading it to a form of stalking, when in reality this information was simply basis for her social interactions. It lent her a clear upper hand when approached with their adult small talk, their petty questions, their condescending ways.

Except she simply wasn't feeling it tonight. She'd broken tradition, putting on a fancy dress she'd left to collect dust in the back of her closet, and tried her best to give the impression of a mentally stable, successful girl.

"Rose."

The girl whipped around to face her mother, who had somehow slipped up behind her completely unnoticed. "What?" She glanced at the thin, pale-faced boy shuffling his feet awkwardly beside her mother. Strangely familiar, and yet Rose couldn't remember a single point in her life having ever seen him.

"I'd like you to meet John Egbert," her mother said, a black-lipped partially false smile blooming on her face. "He attends college in New York City. He's the son of an old aquaintance of mine. When I found out that he lived here, of all places, I decided it would be spectacular if you two were aquainted with one another." This meant her mother had, at the very most, consumed roughly two-thirds of one bottle of wine. At that level of drunkness, she could still control her mental faculties smoothly, although she was hardly aware of Rose's current mental state—not to mention the fact that Rose didn't care at all for socializing. With her as she was, she gave an air that leaned less towards "young genius with an uncanny love for wizards and many things gothic" and more towards "psychopath."

Everyone disregarded this. Why shouldn't she?

"Hey," John mumbled lamely. He was hardly dressed for this occasion, what with the vivid blue hoodie and baggy jeans and carelessly tousled hair. There was a light blue graphic on his hoodie. Rose ordinarily would have thought it to be a wave, but . . . that simply wouldn't sit right with her. _Breath_.

That somehow made sense to her, although she hadn't the slightest idea why. Just logical assumptions working their way into her mind.

"Well then, I'll let you two get to know each other now," Rose's mother said, severing Rose's train of thought. "Business to attend to and whatnot." She was certain that Ms. Lalonde was talking about how much alcohol she would be able to consume within the next hour. Oh, well.

"So, John." Rose began their conversation slightly less flavorfully than she would have liked. "Tell me about yourself."

He didn't seem to mind just standing there with her. "Uh, well, my dad lives in Washington. That's where I go for pretty much every break. Y'know, since I technically don't _live_ here."

Rose lifted an eyebrow. "Mhm. Go on."

"Not much to it. I'm just majoring in physics. Gravity, friction, you know. It's just kind of something where you feel like there's more to it than just those few limits." John shrugged. "So, what're you majoring in?"

"Well, at the moment, I'm not enrolled in any universities," Rose stated matter-of-factly.

"Really? Why?"

"Oh, you know," sighed Rose. In her brief pause, she contemplated revealing her hallucinations to him. But no, first impressions were important. Time for that nonsense later. She opted for an alternate truth, if not slightly bent. "Child genius sort of thing. Although, I would study human psychology if I did enroll in a school. It's been a deeply imbedded interest since I was a toddler." Rose decided against telling him that she was already quite familiar with the psychology of not just humans, but felines as well.

"Okay." John rocked back and forth on his heels, a blatant display of awkwardness and discomfort. For the first time in months, Rose felt a smirk playing the corners of her lips.

"So, how are you finding New York?"


End file.
